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Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland Paperback – September 1, 2008
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A Red States rebellion is breaking out. It’s been going on for some time. The stakes are high and the odds are long and the battles are waged over the essentials of life: water, food, wilderness, and human liberty.
Out here there are no fixed blueprints for resistance. No organizational flow charts for how to plot a rebellion. No focus groups or pulse polls or field-tested PR strategies or genteel formalities for grant applications. Marx would be confused. The human spirit is the best guide. When Peabody Coal announces its intention to evict your grandmother, dynamite her hogan and strip-mine the family sheep pasture, you don’t have time to consult Weiden and Kennedy for how to spin it to your advantage or wait around for a year on the infinitesimal chance that Pew Charitable Trusts might drop you a few bucks. You must act. As a group if you can, unilaterally if necessary—militantly if you must. The resistance in these places isn’t always about revolution; it’s about maintaining a semblance of dignity in a world where such a thing is in short supply.
This book offers just a few snapshots of grassroots resistance that is taking place in the forgotten heartland of America. These are tales of rebellion and courage. Out here activism isn’t for the faint of heart. Be thankful someone is willing to do the dirty work.
“Thank you to all who contributed to this absolutely necessary book that tells too-often ignored stories of resistance and rebellion from real people—working class people, indigenous people, people with dirt under their fingernails and rage and sorrow in their hearts, as well as a deep and profound love for the land where they live—who are fighting for their lives, for their communities, and for their landbases against the grinding of the creeping fascism of the corporate state.” —Derrick Jensen, author of Endgame.
“The stakes are high, in the so-called ‘Red States,’ as corporate America, the defense establishment, and an array of minions battle against the biodiversity of "the heartland." In this book, Joshua Frank and Jeffrey St. Clair skillfully present a diverse set of rebels who defy reckless policies and greedy profiteers. It's easy to feel enthusiastic gratitude for this collection of stories. Matching the principled stance of the narrators, however, presents a sharp challenge.” —Kathy Kelly, co-coordinator, Voices for Creative Nonviolence.
“Those of us who are tired of being laid claim to by right-wing politicians and tut-tutted over by coastal liberals can now brandish a copy of Red State Rebels and declare, ‘This is the real story out here!'” —Stan Cox author of Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine.
“No myth is more urgently in need of debunking than the notion that the ‘enlightened’ residents of so-called Blue states are inexorably pitted against the ‘backward’ masses of so-called Red states. Joshua Frank and Jeffrey St. Clair have woven together a collection of gripping stories of these struggles, large and small, that are transforming the political landscape from the bottom up.” —Sharon Smith, author of Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States.
Joshua Frank was born and raised in Montana. He is the author of Left Out!: How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush. His investigative reports and columns appear in CounterPunch, Chicago Sun-Times, CommonDreams.org, and the Anderson Valley Advertiser.
Jeffrey St. Clair was born and raised in Indiana. He is co-editor of CounterPunch, and his latest book is Born Under a Bad Sky.
- Print length280 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherAK Press
- Publication dateSeptember 1, 2008
- Dimensions5.5 x 1 x 8 inches
- ISBN-101904859844
- ISBN-13978-1904859840
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Product details
- Publisher : AK Press; First Edition (September 1, 2008)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 280 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1904859844
- ISBN-13 : 978-1904859840
- Item Weight : 15.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 1 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #7,272,054 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,250 in Radical Political Thought
- #2,275 in Canadian Politics
- #2,886 in Political Advocacy Books
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors

Jordan Flaherty is an award-winning journalist, producer, and author. He has appeared as a guest on a wide range of television and radio shows, including CNN Morning, Anderson Cooper 360, CNN Headline News, RT America, the Alan Colmes Show on Fox, and News and Notes on NPR. He is the author of the books No More Heroes: Grassroots Responses to the Savior Mentality and Floodlines: Community and Resistance From Katrina to the Jena Six and has produced television documentaries and news reports for Democracy Now, teleSUR, The Laura Flanders Show, and Al Jazeera, including as a producer on the Emmy, Peabody, and duPont-award-winning program Fault Lines on Al Jazeera.
Jordan’s print journalism has been featured in dozens of publications, from the New York Times and Washington Post to ColorLines and the Village Voice. His articles have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic, and published in major publications around the world, including Die Zeit in Germany, Clarin in Argentina, Juventude Rebelde in Cuba, Red Pepper in England, and many more from Lebanon to Paris to New Zealand to South Africa. He has also reported as a correspondent for Agence France Presse, and written for dozens of news websites including Huffington Post, CommonDreams, AlterNet, Counterpunch, and ZNet. As a white southerner who speaks honestly about race, Jordan Flaherty has been regularly published in Black progressive forums such as Black Commentator and Black Agenda Report, and is a regular guest on Black radio stations and programs such as Keep Hope Alive With Reverend Jesse Jackson.
Jordan has produced award-winning fiction films, documentaries, music videos, and news reports, and his reporting and analysis has been published in several anthologies, including the South End Press books Live From Palestine and What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race and the State of the Nation; the University of Georgia Press book What is a City; the AK Press book Red State Rebels; and Bury The Dead from Cascade Books. He has appeared as an actor in HBO’s television series Treme, playing himself. He produced the fiction film Chocolate Babies, which was recently added to The Criterion Collection.
Jordan was the first journalist to bring the case of the Jena Six to a national audience, and he has so far been the only journalist identified as a subject of the New York City Police Department’s spying programs. His journalism awards include awards from New America Media for Best Post-Katrina Reporting in the Ethnic Press, and from the National Headliner Awards for Best Broadcast Environmental Reporting.
Jordan has lectured at dozens of colleges, universities and conferences including Columbia University, Stanford Law School, Yale, University of California at Santa Cruz, University of California at Los Angeles, SUNY Stonybrook, American University in Washington DC, Loyola University Chicago, University of Florida, University of Chicago, University of Texas at Austin, Loyola Law School, Tulane University, University of New Orleans, Xavier University, and many others. He was an editor of The Abolitionist, a bilingual newspaper distributed mostly in prisons in North and South America, and from 2004-2011 he was a part of the editorial collective that published Left Turn Magazine, a publication that reported from progressive and revolutionary movements around the world.
You can see more of Jordan's work at jordanflaherty.org.

Dean Kuipers’ new memoir, The Deer Camp, recounts how a wildlife habitat project saved his relationship to his father by getting their hands in the dirt. He is an award-winning journalist and writes on nature, environmental politics, and the arts. He is the author of several non-fiction books, including Burning Rainbow Farm, which was a 2007 Library of Michigan Foundation Notable Book; Operation Bite Back, about eco-activist Rod Coronado; and I Am A Bullet, a study of cultural acceleration with fine artist Doug Aitken. Kuipers and his wife, Lauri Kranz, co-authored A Garden Can Be Anywhere, a personal and stylish new how-to book on organic gardening. He has edited two books about the much-beloved rock and roll magazine, Ray Gun, including the new Ray Gun: The Bible of Music and Style.
He has contributed to several anthologies, including The Contenders, about the 2008 election, and Red State Rebels. He was an editor at the Los Angeles Times, Spin, Ray Gun, and Los Angeles CityBeat, and his work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, Orion, The Atlantic, Wired, Playboy, Men’s Journal, Outside, Interview, Travel & Leisure, Capital & Main, The Nation, Pacific Standard, LA Weekly and other publications. He lives in Los Angeles.

Joshua Frank is an environmental journalist and managing editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America (Haymarket Books, 2022).

Jeffrey St. Clair (born 1959 in Indianapolis, Indiana) is an investigative journalist, writer and editor. He is the co-editor, with Joshua Frank, of the political magazine and website CounterPunch, and a contributing editor to the monthly magazine In These Times. He has also written for The Washington Post, San Francisco Examiner, The Nation, The New Statesman and The Progressive.
St. Clair attended the American University in Washington, D.C., majoring in English and history. In 1990, he moved to Oregon to edit the influential environmental magazine Forest Watch, later renamed Wild Forest Review. In 1994, he joined journalists Alexander Cockburn and Ken Silverstein on CounterPunch. He now co-edits the newsletter and the popular website.
In 1998, he published his first book, with Cockburn, Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press, a history of the CIA's ties to drug gangs from World War II to the Mujahideen and Nicaraguan Contras. This was followed by A Field Guide to Environmental Bad Guys (with James Ridgeway), Five Days that Shook the World: Seattle and Beyond, Al Gore: a User's Manual, The Politics of Antisemitism, Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature, Imperial Crusades, Grand Theft Pentagon, A Dime’s Worth of Difference, End Times: the Death of the Fourth Estate, Red State Rebels, Born Under a Bad Sky, Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, Killing Trayvons: an Anthology of American Violence, Bernie and the Sandernistas, The Big Heat: Earth on the Brink, and An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents.
He was the recepient of the Anti-Censorship prize at the 2022 American Book Awards.
Jeffrey St. Clair lives in Oregon City with his wife Kimberly Willson, a librarian.
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The title of the book is deceiving. I expected a digest of radical activity from all sides of the political spectrum, but it quickly became clear that, by "Red State Rebels," Frank and St. Clair did not mean to describe everyone fighting the national status quo within so-called red states. The essays in this book mainly describe groups and individuals fighting against the status quo in the so-called red states. Meaning, simply put, this is a book about only one shade of rebels--pacifists, environmentalists, and progressives--fighting against their classic enemies.
Aside from a brief nod to Randy Weaver and various secession movements, nary a word is spent on the colorful variety of Middle American rebels. Constitutionalists, anti-abortion protestors, Alex Jones, 9/11 truthers, militiamen, and others are conspicuously absent. Their absence is made even more conspicuous because in Frank and St. Clair's introduction, they take great pains to portray their work a focused on a non-partisan approach to the subject. "Neither of us fit in the geo-ideological matrix contrived by the mainstream political establishment," they write. "Neither do thousands of others, left, right and anarcho-libertarians, who reside in the forgotten midsection of the nation."
The articles in Red State Rebels then proceed to breeze past the inhabitants of the Right to focus on champions of the traditional causes of the Left. Including one essay on Randy Weaver does not help balance it out. Furthermore, the "rebellion" covered by Red State Rebels is hardly worth noting. The book portrays a pacifist priest who was arrested for putting a flower on a nuclear missile silo as a great martyr to the cause. Only a handful of the essays address serious actions that threaten the status quo. The great prairie fire portrayed on the cover is revealed, on the inside, to be nothing more than a puff of smoke.
I am afraid that Red State Rebels defeats the editor's own intentions by portraying only traditional Left-wing causes as being worthy of attention in Middle America. I believe there is a desperate need for a second volume of this work, one that fills in the blanks.

